Page 57 of Outfoxed

I recognized the building as one of the smaller warehouses tucked along the carved wall of Asylum, guarded like every other warehouse, as the sanctuary’s owner understood supplies meant the difference between life and death when trapped underground. With someone always patrolling the buildings, I’d stayed far from them, but my magic took me places I’d never been, as usual.

In one of the dark recesses, where the narrow passage between the buildings ended at an unadorned rock wall, a guard and a dark figure in a trench coat met. The guard, a middle-aged, tired man, accepted an envelope, checked its contents, and nodded. I struggled to remember his face, but he came in as disturbingly average, with no features setting him apart from any other older, brown-haired, brown-eyed man from the Alley.

Average faces created excellent crooks, circumventing my ability to tell anyone quite who he was, beyond he wasn’t ugly, he wasn’t precisely handsome, his eyes, nose, and mouth were all in the right place, and he fell right in the middle of the pack when it came to age.

Damn it.

He did me no good.

Unfortunately, neither did my glimpse at the figure wearing that damned trench coat, as he took care to hide his face. I assumed he was a man due to his height and build. Anna had a man’s build, except for her breasts, which did a good job of exposing her.

Nothing about the man implied he might be a woman, and while he wore a trench coat, it fit him well.

I checked his feet, which seemed far too large to be a woman’s.

My magic wanted me to know something. I remembered being shot. I could only assume my magic developed a mind of its own and did its best to identify who’d tried to kill me. Had killed me? Nobody knew what happened after death. Maybe I’d slipped back in time, to the first day of the storm season, and would haunt the fucker. I could handle some haunting, and I’d do so without a scrap of remorse.

The guard returned with a handgun, an older model, and a box of bullets.

If I survived, I’d make a little altar to my magic for warning me Asylum held treacheries beyond my expectations, and that the guards could be bought.

The pair spoke for a few moments in hushed tones, which my magic failed to catch.

I figured being shot hampered my magic’s ability to function.

Knowing where the gun came from helped, although I cursed the guard’s bland features, which would make finding him again later difficult, unless he happened to be the only average brown-haired, brown-eyed man employed within Asylum.

My shooter, armed with his new gun, left the alley, and the guard waited for him to leave before opening the side door into the warehouse. Like a puppy eager to please, my magic followed.

The warehouse proved to be an armory, and high-powered weapons, the kind the military liked to use, filled racks along the walls. Wooden boxes with warning labels promising explosives within took up a terrifying amount of space.

What the hell was going on in Asylum?

My magic offered no answers, and I slid back into a black, silent void.

Twelve

Pain sucked.

Tuesday, May 12, 2043.

Asylum, Oklahoma.

The Alley.

The last time I’d been to a hospital, my father’s mother had been killed in a car accident, and the police had wanted someone to identify her body. I’d found the morgue’s presence, located in the basement, to be coldly efficient. Why take the dead to another location? One quick trip down an elevator took the bodies where they could be put in cold storage until they headed off to their next destination, a funeral home or crematorium. In my grandmother’s case, a funeral home for embalmment and however else they prepared bodies for a viewing.

According to the presence of a worn nurse on her rounds, I hadn’t been taken to the morgue quite yet. I thought about catching her attention, but I decided against pushing my luck. I’d used up all of my luck surviving being shot in the outskirts. My gut and back burned and throbbed, evidence I’d gotten a lot more than an armful of bullet. The act of breathing exhausted me, and I doubted they’d taken any pity on me in terms of painkillers.

They probably assumed I’d bring fleas to the hospital, and after several days out of Tulsa’s safety, I’d been a little worse for wear.

The nurse left.

Pain sucked, I regretted my general survival for the moment, and I contemplated tearing out the IV line hooked into my arm in the hope of offing myself to escape from the pain. My right arm, trapped in a sling, refused to do anything I wanted, and someone had foreseen my willingness to rip out the damned thing, as my left wrist was tied to the bed.

I could only assume I’d attempted to rip it out once before, and I’d been restrained to keep from doing additional injury to myself. A blanket covered my abdomen, but if I judged from the fire eating away at me from the inside, someone had rearranged my internal organs with a projectile.

I supposed two could play at the magic game, and while delving into the past was a rarer magic than witnessing the present or the past, if I could do it, so could others. Had someone caught me investigating the source of the storms? The Alley, particularly Asylum, wasn’t completely cut off from the rest of the United States. We could access the internet, and cell towers still worked.